Stories

Jumpstart Lab offers corporate, private, and public training in Ruby, Rails, and supporting technologies. Public classes are constantly being held in Washington, DC, and corporate and private trainings can be scheduled anywhere, worldwide. These guys are not only great programmers, but they're also experienced teachers. Check out their site for more information and to view their training curricula.

Mirko Froehlich documented his approach to building a Twitter status filter using Sinatra, Redis, and Tweetstream - Twitter's new streaming API. It's interesting to note that he went with Redis because of its native support for ordered list storage. Is Redis the new memcached?

Last week, Chris Wanstrath posted on the GitHub blog about the experiences they've had with several background job and queueing solutions. Ultimately they've built their own solution on Redis, called Resque, and released it... on GitHub.

Matthew Savage released a new plugin over the weekend called Heroku Asset Packager. It wraps the asset packager plugin by Scott Becker, redirecting the generated files to the app tmp directory - due to Heroku's read-only filesystem limitations - and then provides you with a middleware to intercept and re-route those asset requests. It makes using an asset packager on Heroku simple, painless, and nearly invisible.

Myron Marston released a gem, called mail_safe, which allows you to define an email address which may be used to override all recipients in generated mailer messages. It is enabled on a per-environment basis, so that you can be sure you don't accidentally spam all of your users when testing that new feature on staging or in development.

Effectif Development’s Grahm Ashton wrote up a brief, but informative summary of why you should leave Ruby exceptions strictly for exceptional situations. He found that this type of implementation can easily run several times slower - by nearly an order of magnitude - than using simple if-else conditionals. His summary, tests, and benchmark results can be found over the post.

Jumpstart Labs recently released a Ruby on Rails tutorial to learn all of the basics while building an app called "JSBlogger." It's a good and hands-on approach to introducing yourself or your coworkers to Ruby and Rails.